Tuesday, November 24, 2009

There are four less feet clicking on our floors today at my house. One less gentle loving friend to greet us at the door. It's heart breaking.

Jette was 13.5 years old and suffered from hip and knee problems. Her body just couldn't keep up anymore. We're going to miss her dearly. A more gentle, psychotic looking dog you've never met. She was the best alarm system that we could have had and a wonderful playmate. She was our first baby and is the first to go of our four footed children.

It's been difficult to explain to the Youngest. When he asks where Jette is, we just tell him that "She's at God's house." He asked us after that if the baby was hugging her and we said, "Yes, Baby Jesus is hugging her." It's only the truth.

Monday, November 23, 2009

I showed you a WIP last week that was over a year and a half old. Well, this week's FO completely put it to shame. This one took me over SEVEN YEARS. Yep, seven whole years.

This is my denim quilt that I began way back when: and finished a couple of nights ago:

We were cleaning out the garage and I found it. The reason that I never finished it was because of the scissors and denim combination. You have to clip through two layers of denim and two layers of cloth and it's very tiring on the hands. When I found it again, I got it out and started cutting. I ended up using small garden shears to do it. I was supposed to be doing laundry, but we all know how that goes, huh? I ended up with blisters on my thumb and my pinky finger the other night as I finished it. Not the fun part of this quilt. Then I washed and dried it and it was ready to go.

The denim was all from jeans that were worn my me, the hubby and the Eldest. The Youngest wasn't even a thought at the time of this quilt's beginning. This is such a great way to use up old denim jeans and jackets.

Here's a close up so you can see what I'm talking about with the clipping of the denim. The clipping allows the backing fabric and the denim to fray so that the backing color peeks in through the denim in the front.

It is an incredibly easy quilt to make. The hard part is getting enough denim to start the project.

How do you make it?

Wash your backing fabric first! Then start cutting out squares. You will have to do some math to figure out how many to make. It depends on if you want a throw size or a specific bed size. This one is a twin size. A smaller quilt would have been so much smarter to do on my part. I believe the squares were around 6" square. Then they were sewn in strips - one denim and one fish. Next, the strips were all sewn together with the seams all on the denim side. Clip the seams carefully, don't go through the sewing. Wash and dry about four or five times and you're done! You really don't need more instructions than that for this quilt. If you want more details, let me know and I will attempt to remember back seven years for you.

It's extremely heavy. This would be a great one to leave in the trunk of the car and use for picnics or other outdoor activities.